Robert Cushman: The triumph of Lincoln, in history and film

The triumph of Lincoln, in history and film

I’m very fond of a remark by the British playwright Howard Brenton, who said that there are only two kinds of play: plays set in rooms and plays not set in rooms. The implication was that there is domestic drama and there’s epic drama and that, in the modern theatre, there’s been more of the former than the latter.

The same holds true, with some variation, for movies, though of course a film, even on an intimate subject, is likelier than a play to go outdoors because it’s easier to do. If it aspires to epic, then it’s going to spend most of its time outside, with “outside” usually being a battlefield, or at least a riot-torn street.

That’s one of the things that makes Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln such a remarkable movie. It is an epic, but it’s set in rooms.

Not entirely: It starts on the battlefield, with a brief, grim, muddy scene of hand-to-hand conflict, that gives a better idea of what fighting in the American Civil War (or any war of that period or earlier) must actually have been like than any other film I recall. The background is established; we don’t get back there until the war has ended, and the film nearly has, when we’re taken on a tour of artistically-posed corpses, that’s one of the picture’s falser notes. Between times, we’ve mainly been in the White House or in that grimier house known as Congress. We’ve been watching politics. Which means wheeling and dealing, depicted with notable relish and in notable detail. It’s what gets left out of most ostensibly political films, whether historical or current.

Most of all, we’re watching a head of state with a limited time-frame in which to achieve his aims. Like, say, a U.S. President at the start of his second term.

Lincoln may have temporised previously about emancipation, but the film doesn’t mention it; we must assume either that he didn’t mean it or that he changed his mind. The man we see is positive about his aims, convinced they’re just, and unblushing about resorting to bribery, or equivocating about Confederate peace overtures, in order to achieve them. He seems, indeed, rather to enjoy it. But that’s politics. And it’s in an overwhelmingly good cause.

Of course, all political issues are ultimately moral ones, but some – environmental protection, gun control, abortion – are more obviously so than others. Slavery seems the most cut-and-dried of all, the least open to debate. The film reminds us, pointedly, that it wasn’t always.

The characters talk; sometimes, especially when the house is in session, they shout, both excitedly and excitingly, but most of the time it’s conversation, often conducted in poised, even witty sentences. This has obviously disappointed some people; the most common criticism of the film has been that it’s “talky” (with the unspoken addition “don’t they know there’s a war on?”; they do, that’s why they’re talking).

As it happens, this Shavian kind of writing is a departure for its author, Tony Kushner, who is best-known for plays, chiefly Angels in America, that are certainly very verbal, but aren’t naturalistically grounded in this way; I’d call them epic-fantastic.

It’s audacious — anti-Hollywood really — for a film whose title suggests a full-dress biography to confine itself to just a few weeks of its protagonist’s life. We see Lincoln, with the end of the war in plain sight, determined to push through the Thirteenth Amendment so that the outlawing of slavery will be a done deal before peace is declared. Basically, the picture is about him securing the required number of votes, and it’s a nail-biting process, even though we already know the outcome. (It’s like an action movie keeping us on the edge of our seats, despite our knowing from experience that the hero will triumph. Funny how often that happens.)

There are all sorts of amusing contemporary echoes; we see interested parties, keeping in touch by telegraph, tallying the score, doing everything but tweet their friends about it; just as earlier we’ve watched Lincoln himself hesitating over the wording of a wire like a man at a keyboard agonizing over whether to press send.

Lincoln, of course, was filmed during President Obama’s first term – and conceived, we know, before then – but it’s been prescient in its timing. It gives us the perpetual American drama of a bill, passed in one house, needing to be taken through another. It allows us to compare the partisan vituperation of their age with ours: probably about equal as far as media are concerned (their papers and pamphlets, our internet) though it seems that on the actual floor our representatives are a trifle more decorous than theirs were.

At least, it’s hard to imagine one of our politicians publicly insulting an opponent in the terms that Tommy Lee Jones’ foaming abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens applies to the aptly named congressman (Fernando) Wood: “Even a reptile like you, sir” he says, neatly turning the man’s white supremacist arguments against him “ deserves to be held equal before the law.” Great satisfaction in the house: We’d been longing for him to make precisely that argument.

Stevens is actually reining himself in; he’d like to say more, but has been entreated not to alienate the undecided. Lincoln, like Obama, is under as much pressure from his left as from his right. (Watching this film, you have of course to keep performing mental and historical gymnastics, regarding Democrats and Republicans.) In fact, Stevens is the character in the movie undergoing the most moral conflict. Lincoln doesn’t seem to have any.

One of the most revealing scenes shows Lincoln, after his victory, admitting to his black housekeeper that he doesn’t know what comes next for her people: the film’s tacit acknowledgment of how much further there was to go, and maybe another Obama connection: politicians who can do nuance. Not to mention those who, as Ulysses S. Grant says to Lincoln, graphically age on the job.

That housekeeper is otherwise an idealised figure, and the criticism that the film’s black characters are tokens is probably justified. The movie might have been truer to itself, and made a subtler statement, if it had done without black characters altogether; but it probably couldn’t have got away with it. Similarly, its creators would probably have preferred not to include Lincoln’s assassination; but they must have felt they couldn’t leave it out, and their supposedly clever way of showing it amounts to a cheap trick.

The soothsayers say that Lincoln probably won’t win the Oscar for Best Picture: this despite having the traditionally victorious quality of making our pulses race in a righteous cause. Nobody doubts that Daniel Day-Lewis will win for Best Actor, and so he should; he presents a man who is believably great, and good, and human. Not to mention humorous, and shy, and tall.

I haven’t always been a Day-Lewis fan, though we do have one thing in common: We both, on successive nights, walked out of his performance as Hamlet. He had a breakdown while playing it, in London in 1989, and left the stage half-way through, never to return. The previous evening, I’d left at intermission as his performance, for reasons I couldn’t then know, was communicating nothing.

In his film career since, I’ve sometimes felt that I was watching his legendarily arduous preparation for a role, rather than the character. But his Lincoln goes beyond impersonation based on books; it’s a full, autonomous creation. And so for the whole movie; like Schindler’s List it shows Spielberg as the best kind of populist: someone who, even with lapses and compromises, can dramatise huge, hideous events without cheapening them. The film summons history; it also illuminates the way we live now.